"Everyone said, 'The pilot is a killer. It's a 10 - 10 out of 10,' " Gerber said. "Our whole pitch was not to sell the pilot but to show people how we would do it five nights a week."

Gerber and the show's distributor, Columbia TriStar Television, were convincing, it seems. And in fact the show will be airing six nights a week, including a rerun on the weekend. The syndicated half-hour series, which is taped before a studio audience at Universal Studios Florida, debuts tonight in 90 percent of the country. Locally, it will air at 11 p.m. weeknights and 1:30 a.m. Sundays on WKCF-Channel 18.

Producers of The Newz believe their fast-paced comedy show directed at young adults offers a clear alternative to the talk shows and, importantly, the real news. Because for some people comedy would be an easy choice over gory backyard crime stories, producers would much rather go head to head with local broadcast news than with David Letterman or Jay Leno.

Now it's up to TV audiences to decide if producers of The Newz have rallied enough comic talent to be funny evening upon evening. Surely, its doubters say, if Saturday Night Live - which will be 20 years old next year - could have been cloned weeknights, it would have already been done.

Although acknowledging the ambitiousness of their venture, The Newz producers say they have both timing and talent working in their favor. In the first place, late-night television is hot. Last year's talk show war, especially that between Letterman and Leno, wound up increasing the audience for late-night TV.

"It's the old story that if you build it they will come," said Gerber, a former Viacom executive who has relocated to Orlando. "If you have terrific programming people will stay up and watch because it fills a void."

If the show bears similarities to Saturday Night Live, there's good reason. It was created by Palm Beach producer Jim McNamara and Michael Wilson, son of Dave Wilson, the director of SNL for most of its years on the air.

Wilson, 30, virtually grew up on the set working in a variety of behind-the-scenes roles. He is the show's creative driver. He rounded up the cast of nine comedic actors, two of whom are from Florida. He oversees its writing staff. Wilson, who created pilots for a similarly formated but ill-fated one-hour show for ABC in 1991, believes his success lies in the smart use of resources.

So far, he has turned out 40 episodes of the 90 ordered. Surveys of the more than 16,000 people who have watched the shows at Universal indicate the production team is delivering satisfying belly laughs.

"We have assembled a whole new factory of next-generation creative talent," Wilson said. "I'll go that far to say it's just a major, major wealth of talent."

Wilson describes the comedy as broad. Sometimes the humor will be mainstream as on SNL, sometimes it will be urban as on In Living Color and sometimes it will be as weird as Monty Python's Flying Circus. In one sketch, a clueless space shuttle commander leaves his crew stranded on a satellite, in another writers poke fun at the yuppification of baseball stadium fare.

There will be commercial and talk show parodies and recurring characters. "Bag Boy," played by Stan Quash, is a hostile supermarket bagger, and Tom Slack, played by Brad Sherwood, is a narcoleptic who falls asleep while going about crucial jobs - like heart surgery.

The shows are written and rehearsed in Los Angeles, where most of this talent lives. In a seven-week production cycle, producers crank out 21 shows. The only thing the show loses in this process is timeliness of some subject matter, Wilson says. If Congress embarrasses itself one day, The Newz can't take jabs the next.

When the writing is done, everyone flies to Orlando for three weeks of taping. They produce seven shows in six days. They work 12-hour days.

Producers of The Newz are shooting in Orlando because of cheaper labor rates and facilities, but they discovered there was a bonus benefit. Like going on location with a film, the cast is isolated from the demands of family and friends to focus solely on the show.

"It creates a very concentrative, creative biosphere on the lot that is uninterrupted by agents in everyday life," Wilson said.

The result is great chemistry among the cast, Wilson said. In production, the energy and passion is comparable, he said, to the early days of SNL when few in the industry believed in SNL's viability.

Actor Tommy Blaze, who recently moved to Orlando from the Tampa Bay area, says this passion in no way means every bit in the show works.

"We know what we've done on this show that is good and we know what sucks," said Blaze, 34, a comedy writer and performer who has been featured in several cable specials.

Blaze will appear in two recurring sketches on The Newz, including an SNL "Weekend Update" spinoff called "The Newz," and in "Ask Abby and Andy," in which he plays one of two advice mavens.

Blaze, who met Wilson in 1982, concedes there have been numerous hurdles for the show, and he, too, was at first a skeptic. The cast is especially critical of the material, he said.

"I think what has made our show good in spite of all its problems and the ambitious goals it set is all this incredible enthusiastic young talent," Blaze said.

Echoed Deborah Magdalena, a 25-year-old comic actress from Miami: "Everyone is a different part and everyone has a different function, and that's what makes this big machine go."

The importance of the cast can't be underestimated. Producers expect, just as on SNL, that there will be certain ensemble members who will capture the public's imagination and achieve some name recognition. They expect that their audience will begin to pick favorites and tune in again and again to watch them.

The challenge now, Wilson said, is to continue building on what works in the show like some of the recurring characters. He believes what he has produced so far will already force naysayers to admit that SNL has met its weekday match.

"I think this is going to be like the little train that could," Wilson said. "It's time for something new. It is time for something that says there are new faces, there are new ideas."